1. Model‐Based Acquisition (MBAcq): Uniting Government and Industry around a Common Standard.

The Digital Engineering Strategy released in June 2018 outlined the DoD's strategic goals which "promote the use of digital artifacts as a technical means of communication across a diverse set of stakeholders." Ultimately, by involving a variety of perspectives in the design decisions, one can increase quality and speed without increasing risks. "In addition to build, test, field and sustainment of defense systems, emphasis was placed on the acquisition and procurement of systems and the importance of digital engineering. This was further reinforced in the Feb 2022 release of the Engineering of Defense Systems Guidebook which contains Digital Engineering sections in each chapter. The norm for Systems Engineering has become Model‐Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) in which models are used at all phases of development. To complete the digital thread from concept to disposal, models will be required for the acquisition phase. This paper will describe Model‐Based Acquisition (MBAcq), and how it can be used to increase clarity for compliance and understanding in Systems and Software Acquisition." (Hause, Hart, 2022) MBAcq can supplant the use of document‐based specification but only if we come together as an industry to develop and agree upon some standardization. A word of caution, model‐based approaches will only be successful if they are grounded in sound systems engineering practices. The thought process to create the models are as equally important as the resulting models themselves. This paper will discuss the work being done by the OMG MBAcq User Group, which is a broad industry body with participation from INCOSE, Armed Services, OUSD, DoD CIO, NDIA, DAU, FFRDCs and many industry suppliers, such as Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, working together to successfully create both the standardization and guidance to successfully deploy MBAcq to the larger community. Parts of this paper were first published by the authors in (Hause, Hart, 202) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]